Giveaway of the Day - Master Of Defense

In Brief:

Master of Defense is a typical tower defense game with decent graphics and a whole load of different monsters to repel. There are several different upgradeable towers to build and magical powers available to repel the invaders. There are five different scenarios each with around 15 levels to play through. If you like Tower Defense games you’ll find several freeware versions over in the game discussion forums. Most will be found in the free games synopsis HERE, though I’ve not updated the synopsis since week 100 (we’re in week 175 at the moment, so you may have to trawl through the game discussion forums for all of the game posts (all start with a week number so are easy to find- I will be updating it shortly.)

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Developers rely on good feedback to improve their games. If you download this game PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE take some time once you’ve played it a while to leave some constructive feedback either positive or negative. The more constructive feedback we get, the more likely developers are to give more games away. The giveaway site already has a very good standing with search engines like Google. Developers want their products out there on the WWW, this site has the potential to do that. The game giveaway project gives away on average between 9 to 17 thousand downloads for each game depending upon what genre and how obscure the game is. That’s a lot of homes these games are being downloaded into and a lot of potential cash that’s being lost by the developers. If we get better games because of better feedback, the community are likely to continue to benefit from the generosity of the developers. Satisfied community members are then more likely to visit the home sites of those developers and purchase games that they may not have bothered with before they discovered the developer via the game giveaway site, thus giving the developers more incentives to give away more decent games to draw more users to their site. There are a lot of game sites and they all want your business. I really do think if we can improve on the quality and numbers of users leaving suitable feedback more developers will join the project. It’s a great environment to recruit beta testers as well; giving the community the opportunity to try out games that aren’t on general release yet.

Again PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE leave some suitable feedback once you’ve played the game for an hour or so. It can be positive or negative, but please explain your reasons for the feedback you post. It doesn’t need to be a dissertation, just a paragraph or two explaining what you think could improve the game and maybe what you didn’t like about the game with suggestions to replace the negative area’s. Thank you in advance to all those who take the time to post a constructive comment. It will be very much appreciated by the developer, the giveaway team and me. Thank you.

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Installation:

The game downloads to a 16.3MB zip file that unpacks to a read me with the terms and conditions and a registration code plus a setup module (the orange icon with the key symbol) Click on the module to install the game then use the registration code provided in the read me to register the game. The installed game is 24.4MB in size. The version number is 1.67e.

It works fine on my Win 7 Ultimate and Pro 64 bit versions and also in XP Pro 32 bit. I’ve not had time to test it in Vista.

The game installs to the following path by default, but can be changed during the installation wizard. The C drive may be different depending upon if you have more than one hard drive installed and whether your OS is installed to the C drive or a different one like mine (which is the F drive, though I always change it to my G drive which is where I prefer to keep all of my games):

C:\Games\Master of Defense\Main.exe

There is a shortcut installed to both the desktop and the start menu/programs list. Also there’s an uninstaller if you wish to delete the game.

Introduction:

Developers Intro:

Master Of Defense is a wonderful strategy game that lets you assume the role of a brave hero, who has been chosen to save the ancient kingdom from the hordes of monsters. The challenge of the game is to ward off relentless attacks of monsters and prevent them from capturing people in your castle.

You will discover 5 diversely-themed locations and a wide array of monster types. Creatures range from big-headed thingies to mutated animals to flying insect-like monsters. Wave after wave they become stronger, faster and take more efforts to stop.

Reference accessed Feb 4th 2012

This game was originally given away back in September 2007 where it received a positive 89% of 298 votes. You can read all of the previous 82 comments HERE. It was also given away in the first few months of the game giveaway project where it received 94% of 411 votes with 91 comments that you can read HERE

The Game:

The following is my review from over four years ago, when this game was given away for the second time. It’s the same game, so I’ve not edited the review at all apart from removing the first paragraph and correcting a spelling error.

The opening screen gives you the choice of starting a new game, resuming an old one or changing the settings. The help menu is only accessible once you enter a game by pressing ‘Esc’, which will bring up an in game menu that gives you access to all the settings as well as saving the game and the help menu.

The introductory music is appropriately dark and foreboding, but I found the in game music too repetitive, but turning it down to a bare murmur, added to the ambiance of the game, without it becoming annoying.

When you start a new game you will be shown a map, which shows your progress through the stages; of which there are 6. Each stage (or campaign) is split into 15 levels. Beware of pressing ‘New Game’ if you are part way through a game because this will cancel any progress you have made in the game. Thankfully when you start the game from the desk top shortcut, you have to click on ‘Start game’ first, which then gives you two options; ‘New Game’ and ‘Continue Game’.

You can restart any level that you have already completed by clicking on the appropriate indicator on the map (though I can’t remember whether this also overwrites your progress). When first starting the game you will be presented with an in game tutorial that comprises of several prompt screens. This can be turned off at any point if you wish; however, I suggest you keep it running until you have completed the entire tutorial; once this has passed you can access the help menu by pressing the ‘Esc’ button. There is a second option you can choose from the start menu called Survival, which takes you straight into the action. There is no tutorial for this game, but you can still access the help menu in the same way.

Once in game, you can move around the stage by using your mouse or the ‘WASD’ keys. As you progress through the levels this movement will be important as you will have to progressively build new towers in strategic locations (initially there are three types of tower each with its own property and strength that you can build) within the settlement or where ever you are in later stages if you are to survive the onslaught of monsters, ghosts and prehistoric beasts. All you have to do is select which tower’s you think are appropriate and place them in strategic locations within the area you control. When monsters pass within the range of these towers, depending upon the properties of each tower, the monsters will either be killed or wounded (indicated by a small bar alongside each monster). Any monster that gets through the defenses then attacks your community, which usually results in some deaths. If all your people are killed before the end of the first stage the game ends. Once all the monsters are killed, you are awarded a certain amount of gold, which is determined by the number of surviving citizens. That is the fewer citizens you lose in the fighting, (which you don’t see), the more gold you will be awarded. This gold can be used to upgrade your towers, which increases their range of influence, thus causing more damage to your opponents. It is very important that you position your defensive towers in strategic locations and upgrade them as often as you can with the gold that you either start out with and/or the gold you earn, because the monsters do get harder to destroy as you progress through the levels and even within the same level.

If you find a tower is useless, or have places it in the wrong place you can sell it and use the gold to build or upgrade more defensive towers. While in game you can change the speed at which time progress’ so that if you want to hurry up the game you can, or if you need more time to think where towers are best placed, or which towers you should upgrade you can slow down the time. Your citizens will have a better chance of survival by strategically placing and upgrading your towers efficiently. If you are new to tower defense, it’s not a hard concept to grasp and I’m sure you’ll soon be protecting your citizens with confidence. Do read the tutorial and check the tips and tricks listed over on the developers site. I’ve linked to it elsewhere in this reiew. Both give useful advice as to which strategies you should adopt for a successful campaign.

By pressing the Esc key you can bring up the in game menu at any time and then return to the game if you wish.

I would highly recommend this game to any arcade game lover. It is a great introduction to this genre of strategy game (i.e Tower Defence strategy game play). If you like it a lot I suggest buying games such as American Conquest/Fight Back, Cossacks/European Wars, or something a little more contemporary such as the WWII Commando’s series or something futuristic such as Tiberium Wars. All of those incorporate some aspects of Tower Defence, though if you are just looking for arcade TD games then you can’t go wrong with Defense grid: The Awakenig and Sanctum.

The developers site has detailed lots of information about the game, describing all of the various monsters you will fight as well as the type of towers available. You can also find a useful tips and tricks section that you may want to check out before proceeding with the game. Outwardly the game seems rather easy, but you’ll soon find that it’s not as easy as some tower defense games that I’ve played over the years. You can check out the tips and tricks section of the developers website HERE, details of the various towers that are available HERE and the monsters HERE and types of skills and magic that you can earn HERE

Features:

- 6 wonderfully-crafted locations to explore

- A Survival mode

- 180 raids of evil monsters

- 4 different towers, fire and balloon

- 3 Magic types

- Towers build and other skills upgrades

- Online highscores table

Slideshow & Video of Game Play:

You can see a short slideshow of about 15 screen captures HERE and another 20 made up of images copied from the net and screen captures of the developers site HERE

You can see a couple of videos of game play, HERE, HERE and a Spanish cheats video HERE

Conclusion:

I give this a 6 out of 10 despite highly recommending it simply because once the giveaway period is over I think the price is over inflated because of the availability of the above far superior games (both in graphics and game play).

That said, it is still a great introduction to this genre of game, especially as it is free today. I would never pay $19.99 for it though because of the older games mentioned above.

Thank you Voodoo Dimension and the game giveaway team for the re run, as I did lose this quite some time ago. I originally gave this only 6 out of 10, but at the time i’d not played through the game I amended my score in view of later levels, which i found challenging and excellent game play. Bear in mind this is quite an old TD game. There have been some fantastic TD games released in the interim such as Defense Grid: The Awakening, Anomoly: Warzone Earth (A reverse TD game) and Sanctum (a first person TD game), plus several others.

You can play loads of free online TD games HERE and HERE.

Scoring

Graphics … 8

Sound … 5

Game play … 8

Re-playability … 7

Total … 28 out of 40 that’s a score of 7 out of 10 which equates to a game worth downloading and keeping for replays later.

Suggestion for the developer:

Include a levels editor.

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Problems installing, activating and running today’s game:

If you have difficulty downloading or activating the game you can try again later or do one of the following – for example once downloaded when you click on the dual activation and set up file you may get the message “Failed to connect. Please try again later” Check to see if your internet explorer isn’t offline (thanks to MrSnoozles/Mike and GMMan for that fix). If the previous suggestion doesn’t work go check out previous comments from the last several weeks and look for comments from GMMan and Mike. They have also posted their possible fixes for this problem.

Mike suggests that you check to see if Internet Explorer is offline (even if you use firefox). If it is make sure that it’s online thn try again. I’ve always tried re-booting my modem and/or router with some success, though Mike has said that doing that does nothing. Still, it’s worth a try if all else fails.

If you are getting the black screen problem right click on the games executable and select properties then click on the compatibility mode and select the disable visual themes. This should fix the problem, if not try disabling the display scaling on higher dpi settings and disabling the desktop composition.

Other fixes include changing your screen resolution, installing the latest direct X (remember that XP uses DX 9 or earlier only, Vista uses DX 10 or before and Win 7 DX11 or before). Also try updating your graphics drivers. The main two chip manufacturers are NVIDIA and ATI (now AMD) both of which offer driver downloads for free. Just go to the respective manufactures home page and you’ll find a link to the driver download page. To find out which graphic card or graphics chip your computer uses type in Dxdiag in the search field (Vista or Win 7) or the run command (XP); this opens up the DirectX diagnostics panel. click on the display tab and look to the left panel. You should easily see what graphics card or chip you are using. (This is required information when selecting the correct download from the developers site).

If you are asked to turn off your Data Execution Prevention for this game to run. You can create an exception so that the game will run without having to turn DEP off. Please bear in mind it’s rare that anyone even mentioned getting a DEP warning. If you are not sure how to create an exception read THIS article, which tells you how to do it.

If you are having problems unzipping the game giveaways zip file, for example getting a message saying the file is invalid try using a different file archiver such as 7-Zip, J-Zip, CAM UnZip, Hamster Free Zip Archiver, GZip, B Zip2, peazip, ZipUnzip, FreeRAR Extract Frog, RAR File Open Knife, ALZip, The Extractor, RarZilla Free Unrar

Okay, that should be enough. there are actually many more free versions available. also there are other commercial titles such as the well-known WinRAR, Stuffit, WinAce, NXPowerlite and Corel Winzip Pro, but IMO 7-Zip is probably one of the better freebies. I did purchase a copy of Stuffit when it was on sale a few years ago and recently repurchased a more up to date version when it was o offer via BitsDuJour, but didn’t like the interface for some reason, so hardly ever use it.

If you are posting requests for help late in the day I would suggest posting in the main giveaway forums in the game Game Discussion . If you’ve installed the game but it won’t work for some reason, it should still be registered, so someone may be able to help at another time. Unfortunately if your problem is actually installing it then once the giveaway period is over there’s nothing that can be done until the game is given away again (though that isn’t guaranteed. It’s always worth checking out the free games sites as sometimes the games we get here are also available for free from them as well.

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If you are looking for something else check out the game discussion forums and the free games synopsis. We’ve posted a couple of thousand free games over the last three years, some of which are fantastic. There are some freeware games that are similar to todays game that you may like to check out; especially if you like this type of game. All of the major game distributors such as Steam, Direct 2 Drive (soon to combine with another site), Impulse and GOG all have some sales with savings as good as 75% in some cases. This weekend it’s 66% off most Warhammer games There’s some space Marines DLC that’s not included in the sale, otherwise everything else is. Todays 24 hour deal is Section 8: Prejudice a unreal tournament like game (only better). A new 24 hour deal starts at 6p GMT. You can check out all of the main distributors deals via the Didematic Site.

If you missed yesterdays game, Romopolis and its sister game Townopolis Gold are available for free 24/7 from MyPlayCity.

the game does not work, error “Memory access violation”.

………………..Moderator comment……………..

Try installing the developers demo and registering that. f you continue to get the error ty updating yor computers drivers.